Carrying of a handicapped person during an emergency evacuation of a building or for other reasons can be very difficult if no equipment for facilitating the task is available.
Conventional conveyances for manually transporting handicapped persons are unsuitable for use under some conditions. Devices which necessarily ride on wheels such as wheel chairs, gurneys or the like are designed for use on unobstructed fairly level surfaces and are not adaptable to travel on stair cases or on rough terrain or along otherwise travelable surface which may be littered with obstacles from some unusual occurence.
Stretchers are somewhat more adaptable to such conditions but also have serious disadvantages. The person on a stretcher is necessarily in a prone position and additional space must be provided at each end of the stretcher for the carriers. Consequently a stretcher has a length which can create problems in maneuvering around corners, stair landings or in negotiating obstacles. A stretcher should be kept fairly level and this can also be taxing to the stretcher bearers. As a practical matter the travel of stretcher bearers on anything other than a fairly level unobstructed surface tends to be slow at best. This can impede movement of other people along constricted passages such as on stairways for example.
At certain periods of past history, persons of high rank were sometimes carried by others in devices known as sedan chairs or palanquins. These included a seat within a cab-like enclosure which was attached to spaced apart carrying poles held by bearers situated both in front of and behind the cab. Such devices, primarily of historical or archeological interest, are far too bulky and cumbersome to be of practical value for the modern purposes described above.
Providing for the manual transport of people during emergencies has recently become a very pressing concern as a result of the widespread construction of new multistory or high rise buildings. Wheel chair ramps and a variety of other design arrangements are being made to make such buildings more accessible to the handicapped. Consequently considerable numbers of handicapped persons may be present in a multistoried building at any given time. There may also be other persons in a building who do not come within the normal definition of the term handicapped but who may also be temporarily unable to walk adequately. Such temporary incapacity may arise from any number of causes such as injury, panic in emergency situations or disabilities brought about by drugs or intoxicants.
Fast evacuation of people from multistoried structures is sometimes necessary because of fire, gas leakage, bomb threats or for any of a number of other reasons. Under some circumstances, of which fire is the most common example, the building elevators may be unavailable for use in evacuating people. Elevator shafts carry flames and smoke upwardly within the building. Persons confined in a closed elevator may be highly exposed to injury or death from smoke inhalation. For these and for a number of other reasons, elevators are returned to the ground floor at the start of the emergency and people are required to use the building staircases as an evacuation route.
Mandatory evacuation procedures also frequently prohibit the use of wheelchairs, stretchers or even crutches on staircases during an emergency evacuation. In addition to the hazard to the handicapped person, attempts to use such devices may slow or block use of the stairs by others. Consequently, it has heretofore been necessary, that handicapped persons be carried down the staircase by one or more other persons during an emergency evacuation. The procedure is very taxing on the persons who must do the carrying and can also be traumatic to the handicapped persons themselves.
The problem is further aggravated by the practical requirement that the hand carrying of handicapped persons down the staircase during an evacuation be delayed until other persons, who are able to walk down the staircase, have been evacuated. This is a practical necessity since unaided hand carrying of persons is a slow operation which could greatly delay the overall evacuation and thereby increase the hazard to everyone concerned.
Persons who must wait and be the last to evacuate a high rise building in an emergency can be placed under a great deal of stress. It is very undesirable from this standpoint that the handicapped, in particular, must be the ones who are evacuated last. An inability to move about without assistance makes the situation still more stressful for the handicapped than it is for other persons.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a very pressing need for some means for facilitating the manual carrying of persons down the staircases of high rise buildings in emergency situations. Such a device should be compact and also be of an economical construction so that it is practical to stock a number of such devices at different locations in high rise buildings. The device should be adaptable to use by untrained carriers without complications or confusion and it should, to the extent possible under the circumstances, be arranged to lessen the trauma to handicapped persons who are carried on the device.
While the emergency evacuation of high rise buildings is perhaps the most dramatic example of the need for a more versatile device for manually carrying persons, there are other circumstances under which such apparatus can also be useful. Many older buildings do not have facilities to accomodate wheelchairs or the like and thus are not accessible to the handicapped unless they are assisted. Travel in many outdoor locations may involve rough terrain on which the conventional conveyances described above are unsuitable.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems discussed above.